Peter Oborne, once second only to Janet Daley as Gordon’s biggest booster amongst the right-wing pundits and the last to lose faith in him, is now calling for Gordon to sit down with a bottle of whisky and a revolver. Oborne says Brown is imploding mentally.

Polly Toynbee once praised Brown as an intellectual colossus, master-strategist and political titan. Now she says Gordon Brown has no ideas and under his leadership Labour has become a rotten, defeatist rabble. Polly recollects that “Many said he had neither the temperament nor the political skills for the top job. I was among those who hoped he had, because you have to live in hope.” Now she has no hope.

Tomorrow is the thirtieth anniversary of the coming to power of Margaret Thatcher. Under Gordon’s chancellorship and premiership Britain has tested to fiscal destruction the tax and spend approach, perhaps a return to sound money and fiscal conservativism is the change which will bring hope.